Raspberry Pi 4

Playground Hardware
#61

channels-dvr.service - Channels DVR
Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/channels-dvr.service; enabled; vendor pre
Active: activating (auto-restart) (Result: exit-code) since Sat 2019-11-02 18
Process: 3157 ExecStart=/bin/sh -c exec /media/pi/New Volume/channels-dvr/late
Main PID: 3157 (code=exited, status=2)
lines 1-5/5 (END)

#62

Okay I see the issue: there is a space in the name of your external drive.

#63

It just plays a few seconds and then pauses. Same if I try to play it on the laptop.

#64

Is the Apple TV set to Home Streaming Quality: Original

#65

Yup

#66

Please submit diagnostics from the app after playback issue occurs

#67

Okay. Thank you!

#68

OK, I renamed the drive, with no space in the name, and reinstalled channels-dvr. This time I was able to get to the config with the web interface, and there is a log file in the data folder.
Thanks VERY much for the help!!

#69

Hi there, when you say you you ran the script on the locally mounted HDD, how do I do that? I want to set up my RPi4 with an external HDD but do not know how to run the install command to install Channels to the HDD as recommended by the official instructions.

#70

You can specify the DVR directory once it is set up. If you want to Channels data directory to be on the external, you could copy the install dir to the HDD and put a symlink in place. Or just mount the HDD to the install location.

#71

My external HDD had an Icon on the desktop, I right clicked on the Icon and choose "open in terminal" (or something similar to that) and the opened a terminal window in the HDD folder. I ran the script for Channels in terminal window in the HDD folder.
Hope that helps

#72

Just want to chime in here and mention how exceptional the progress on the RPI4 as a Channels/DVR server has been. With hardware encoding enabled, I can easily use the server for other things while it works. For example right now 1080i content over the air is being transcoded to 720p 6mbps with <100% CPU usage (of a total 400% on the quad-core RPI4), and two Macs are backing up to the same external USB3 10TB drive Channels uses, via Time Machine. And I still have plenty of free CPU for other things. This was not just a simple port of the Intel hardware acceleration, but required significant new development specific to the RPI4's Arm architecture. Thanks to our developers for their efforts!

7 Likes
#73

Kudos! I am porting my Mac Mini setup over to the P4, and did not expect this so soon either!

For your gear jdts, are you drive mapping the Pi over Ethernet to store content on an Apple Time Machine drive? Or are you using the Pi as a Time Machine?

What library are you using for either?

I went with an old 1TB drive on the Pi4 as it has USB 3, to keep that drive firewalled as well as the I/O loads for media segmented. A couple years ago, I had a Plex server mapped to a Time Machine on a Pi3, and ended up going to direct USB, as the Ethernet suffered on the shared bus of USB on that platform.

#74

I'm using the PI as timemachine server and general network file server, all on the same external disk Channels uses. Not too long ago Apple switched to the (Microsoft standard) SMB file sharing protocol so it's pretty trivial. I'm using samba, the default SMB linux server, which now has built in support for TimeMachine specific stuff (all the fruit stuff). Here's the setup (at the end of /etc/samba/smb.conf):

# New Time Machine share
[timepi]
    comment = Time Machine
    path = /data/timemachine
    browseable = yes
    writeable = yes
    create mask = 0600
    directory mask = 0700
    spotlight = yes
    vfs objects = catia fruit streams_xattr
    fruit:aapl = yes
    fruit:time machine = yes

That said the actual I/O speeds on disk are pretty low, so you could likely use channels on a network mounted drive without issue.

1 Like
#75
#76

Is there any value in using a 4GB or 8GB Pi 4? Will it provide any functional enhancement/performance? I can understand that if you add other services onto the box outside of SAMBA it will have some value. Or is anything over a 2B Pi 4 a waste?

Thoughts?

#77

I have a box running UnRAID, running Channels in a Docker, and I use 4GB of RAM. I will even tell you that less than 2GB of RAM is utilized, even when using all 4 tuners of my HDHOMERUN device.

I use an Intel i3 processor, not the ARM that's built into a Pi, but I hope that helps.

#78

If you’re intending to use it as a dedicated Channels DVR server, I’d say anything larger than 2GB is a waste.

2 Likes
#79

I am using a Argon 1 m.2 case that has a builtin fan control and power button. To use them I need to install a script from argon.

curl https://download.argon40.com/argon1.sh | bash

I am getting an error that "apt-get command not found". Can I install apt-get on this? or any ideas how to deal with this. Would really like the power button control and the fan control would be nice..

#80

You'll need to read through that install script, source the missing programs, and manually install and configure their programs.

The Raspberry Pi 4 image is a minimal operating system, and not meant to be a general purpose system. In your case, you might be better off installing the Raspberry Pi OS, and treating it like a regular Linux system if you can't get Argon tools manually installed.

BETA: Channels DVR Server for Raspberry Pi 4 (USB BOOT IMAGE)